This series of posts introduced various methods of exploratory data analysis, providing theoretical backgrounds and practical examples. Fully commented and readily usable R scripts are available for all topics for you to copy and paste for your own analysis! Most of these posts involve data visualization and plotting, and I include a lot of detail and comments on how to invoke specific plotting commands in R in these examples.

I will return to this blog post to add new links as I write more tutorials.

Introduction

Data in R are often stored in data frames, because they can store multiple types of data. (In R, data frames are more general than matrices, because matrices can only store one type of data.) Today’s post highlights some common functions in R that I like to use to explore a data frame before I conduct any statistical analysis. I will use the built-in data set “InsectSprays” to illustrate these functions, because it contains categorical (character) and continuous (numeric) data, and that allows me to show different ways of exploring these 2 types of data.

If you have a favourite command for exploring data frames that is not in this post, please share it in the comments!

This post continues a recent series on exploratory data analysis. Previous posts in this series include